Boris and Bruno from BOB TONIC have spent their lives in a world of marketers. They come from advertising, they know the history of trends, of the great currents.

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Urban art is the antithesis of their former profession: it is DEFENSE TO DISPLAY!

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It's a weed that was able to grow in a certain context, the 1960s, the counter-culture, the protests, the explosion of consumption. It was totally on the fringes, both of the art market and of legality. It's funny to see how today, in the 2020s, the margin has become the norm.

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And the weed has become this vast, well-cultivated field.

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They like the idea of going into that, when everything, absolutely everything, has already been done and done very well in this great pop iconography.
They just thought, "Let's produce something."
They see themselves as a pop and street start-up, the first st'ART-up.

Art or not art? It doesn't matter, in fact, their approach is above all to put themselves at the service of a message that touches them, to work with popular iconography and to return to the foundations of pop.

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"But let's reason with our background; let's not start from the posture of the artist, but from an urban art start-up, a "st'ART-up". Let's start in New York to get back to basics, let's approach sculpture because it's complicated, technically and financially, and let's learn to work with materials. Let's start with popular iconography, let's go back to the foundations of pop. For example, Banksy's "Girl with a Balloon" has become one of the mythical images of the beginning of the 21st century, the same way that the Coke bottle was in the previous century. If urban art becomes iconic and self-parodying, it comes wonderfully full circle. So we do Escape From The Wall, the girl with the balloon, who takes off from her wall" they say.
 

"We put Robert Indiana's Love into a concrete boxing glove. It's called 'love is not a fight'. We created this giant spider crab, a 4-metre sculpture, prickly and tortured like Louise Bourgeois, but with the glossy red, a bit too much, of a Koons. The real guiding idea, however, is to produce unique pieces or very limited series with great rigour in execution and finishing. The splash effect is a classic, but we have made it a spectacular and perfectly finished object, and our production process is expensive.  Beyond resin, bronze and concrete, we will explore, torture and test new materials for this type of work. Thinking like a start-up allows us to free ourselves from a style, from the artist's famous signature, from his line of conduct... And why not, put tech innovation at the heart of it all."

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